Tezuka was born in 1960-11-17 in Osaka, Japan. He graduated from the Design Department of Osaka University of Arts, and was hired at Nintendo in April of 1984. Shortly after being hired, Tezuka was teamed up with Shigeru Miyamoto to work on two of their most seminal games; Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. In his early years, he went by the alias "Ten Ten." By the late 1990s, Tezuka began working as a supervisor or producer on most titles. Tezuka continues to work for Nintendo to this day as the executive officer of Nintendo EPD and has been involved, in some capacity, in over 100 titles.

Though I didn't know who Takashi Tezuka was in the 1980s, I was very familiar with his work, having been a big fan of pretty much every game he was involved with. It was only until years later when the Internet helped track down the real names behind the aliases in the early games, was I able to understand his full impact on my early game appreciation. While it's still difficult to suss out precisely what he did in each game, he has been a driving force in the shape of video gaming.

Gameography

This gameography includes every game Takashi Tezuka worked on up to and including 2000. The column Rank is the order in which I enjoy these games; if it is blank, I haven't played the game enough to rank it.